Confirming our Fears

Confirming our fears-A rant 

“I’m trying to get my body ready for summer.” 

“I can’t do that I will look fat.” 

“Omg I gained happy weight”

“I’m so disgusting I can’t get rid of my quarantine weight.”

These are comments that as a fat person are a knife into me. When you make statements like these you are equating my body and bodies like mine as undesirable and inferior. This is their rhetoric your fat friends see and think, “wow they must think even worse things about me.”

Existing in this fat body is hard as hell!!

Every day we have to do it. Waking up in a body knowing that it’s going to be verbally abused, ridiculed, the butt of every tacky joke…it’s so hard. 

People make these blanket statements of body shaming in the name of making people feel superior because of their own insecurities. 

Limited thinking such as this is anti-fat in its inception. 

Anti-fatness is rooted in patriarchy, misogyny, and ableism, just as specific and harmful as any other. 

From the fashion industry to the medical field and diet culture anti-fat rhetoric permeates the very fiber of our daily living. 

So when you make a post “I can’t wait to lose this quarantine weight because I am disgusting.” 

Although you are entitled to how you feel about your own body, the hope is that you are learning to love it, but the people you love see them and hear them and internalize it to be about them. 

This is not to say you have malicious intent behind your words but you are confirming what people who struggle with body image already feel…unworthy, undesirable, and insignificant.